Category: Retirement
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Naming Beneficiaries on Retirement Plans
Every retirement plan you own has a spot for you to designate a beneficiary. It seems like a simple problem right? Just pick someone you trust and everything will be okay. Couples name their spouse, singles name their parents or their children, everyone can think of at least one person they’d want to leave their…
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Can A Roth IRA Be Taxed?
One of the greatest concerns many Americans have about Roth IRAs is whether a change in the tax code can end up screwing us. Right now, you are taxed on contributions made into a Roth IRA but you are not taxed when you take distributions. This is different than the Traditional IRA where you get…
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Can Children Make Roth IRA Contributions?
If you have children (or if you are a child under the age of 18 and reading personal finance blogs, kudos to you!), you might be thinking about what you could do to help give them a jump start on their retirement savings. Roth IRA contribution rules say nothing about age so anyone of any…
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Downsize for Equity in Retirement Years
If you’re close to retirement and have a lot of equity locked up in your home, consider downsizing as a means of supplementing your savings and reducing your overhead. The cost to maintain a large home in your later years can often be very high with increasing utilities, homeowners insurance, and property taxes so it…
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Rebalance Your Portfolio For Greater Gains
Buy low sell high, that’s the mantra of Wall Street (actually, it’s probably “Buy low very often, sell high very often,” but I digress), and one that you can achieve every single time you rebalance your portfolio. Rebalancing your portfolio is a task that no one likes to do because it’s so mechanical, it’s so…
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Target Retirement Funds May Not Be Better
Conventional wisdom states that you should take risks when you’re younger, become more conservative when you’re older, and your finances will be better off for it. This is embodied in the typical advice for asset allocation – take 120, subtract your age, and you should have that value, as a percent, allocated towards equities in…
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How To Analyze 401(k) Fund Offerings
If you just opened your 401(k) or are investigating where you should be invested, my advice to you is to keep things as simple as possible. If it’s your first 401(k), or your first time looking at it with this company, it can be a little overwhelming to figure out what you should be doing.…
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TradeKing.com IRA Review
TradeKing.com is one of the leaders in the online discount broker business with their $4.95 market and limit equity trades and $4.95 option trades (+65 cents per contract). It was named Smart Money #1 Discount Broker in both 2006 and 2007 and likely will win for 2008 as well. It is comforting to know that…
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AARP Financial Guide to Working With Older Clients
Consumerist offered this gem up the other day, a forty-page document released by the AARP called “A Financial Professional’s Guide to Working With Older Clients” (PDF). The first 18 pages were written for financial professionals and you can probably skip them. As a potential client, on the service provider-client side of the relationship, you could…